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Professor Eduardo Pinho Melo
Institute of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Centre for molecular and Structural Biomedicine (CBME), University of Algarve, Campus de Portugal
15th Jan. 2008
2:30 PM

Topics on Structure and Mechanism in Protein Science

Eduardo P. Melo, Institute of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Portugal

Proteins are the major functional molecules of life and can be used as therapeutic agents, catalysts, materials and with diagnostic purposes. Protein science has evolved enormously in the last years with the advances in determining biological structure, manipulating genes, engineering proteins, sequencing whole genomes and computing. This series of lectures intends to outlook key topics in protein science. Enzymes Kinetics will be the subject of the first two lectures. Enzymes mechanisms will be studied and some enzyme will be chosen to illustrate some catalytic mechanisms. The third lecture will focus on protein stability one of the main research lines in my lab. Techniques that can be used to study protein stability and one or two examples selected from my own research will be presented as case studies.  Protein folding, one of the key issues that remain to be solved in Biological science, will be studied in the fourth lecture. The main concepts in protein folding will be introduced and the protein engineering approach to study folding pathways will be explained. Neurodegenerative diseases resulting from protein misfolding, especially the case study of prion diseases will be the fifth topic analyzed. Finally, a general overview of the new field of proteomics will be explained. The study of the ensemble of cellular proteins at once (proteome) opens new perspectives namely on biomedicine.